Last Show Recap

In the first half of the program, host Dave Schrader (email) welcomed author and crime researcher, Diane Fanning, who discussed the terrifying case of Tommy Lynn Sells, a serial killer who made his way across the country for two decades. Open Lines followed in the latter half.

Zombie War & Other Scary Things

In the first half of the show, Ian was joined by researcher and author of The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks, for a War of the Worlds-style radio report on World War Z, the war with the zombies. Brooks, who documented the oral history of these events*, said the zombie plague originated at a lake in China, where a man and his son were diving for relics. The father disappeared, the boy came up with a bite mark on his foot, and from there it spread, he noted. According to Brooks, the Chinese government covered up the ensuing outbreak and never alerted the international community to the impending worldwide apocalypse.

Many countries fell to the walking plague, Brooks continued, including Japan, North Korea, and part of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. Israel was one of the few nations to initiate a nationwide quarantine in time, extending a security fence around the entire country (1967 borders). The island nation of Cuba came through unscathed, Brooks added. In all, the zombie war decimated the human population and, even though the worst of it is over, the undead still pose a significant threat to humanity.

Brooks said land areas known as "White Zones" remain infested with zombies. The walking dead roam the ocean floor as well, perhaps in the millions, he warned. Colder areas of the planet must deal with outbreaks every spring, when frozen zombies thaw out and begin searching for humans to consume. Brooks also briefly spoke about some of the heroes of the war, the role religion played during the crisis, and how the U.N. has assisted in the rebuilding process.

*The events depicted in this story are fictitious. Any similarity between persons living and (un)dead is purely coincidental.

In the latter half of the program, winner of the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Doug Clegg talked about the paranormal and other things that scare us.

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Zombie Physics: How to Avoid the Undead

In August, a group of mathematicians grabbed headlines with their model of an outbreak of zombie infection (see PDF). Then, last month, a paper published in the journal Physical Review E considered how to survive being pursued by "random walkers," such as zombies. The bottom line: you're better off in a complex structure like a mall than stuck in a farmhouse. More at FOXNews.com.